I’m a co-founder of SpectreVision, the company I run with Lawrence Inglee and Elijah Wood. We make genre films, like “Mandy,” “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” and “Color Out of Space,” to name a few.
I’m also what’s known as an experiencer — that is, someone who has frequent experiences with the paranormal. This has been a condition throughout my life, though I only really began to understand and accept it about ten years ago.
As a producer, one always strives to support stories that deal with the trials of our day-to-day lives honestly and accurately, and genre has always been a reliably sneaky way to smuggle those ideas onto the screen. But as I’ve come to settle into the strange reality of paranormal experience, I’ve felt an increasing obligation to portray the supernatural elements in film in ways that are equally honest and accurate.
It’s a unique challenge we sought out in bringing writer/director Bryn Chainey’s “Rabbit Trap” to the screen. The film is a sensitive portrait of a marriage in crisis, that of Darcy and Daphne Davenport (Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen), musicians who relocate from London to a cottage in Wales to complete their new album. When they inadvertently record a mystical sound never before heard by human ears, long-dormant Faerie forces are stirred from the ancient forest, and the veil between this world and theirs begins to thin.
The Faeries of Celtic myth and folklore as seen in “Rabbit Trap” — also known as “The Fae” — have nothing whatsoever to do with fluttering wings and magic wands. These were shape-shifting tricksters, sometimes appearing as humans, sometimes animals, sometimes luminescent and beautiful, sometimes eerie and grotesque. And sometimes not even seen at all.
In this film, the Fae are more a state of mind than a monster in the closet. They’re a ferocious reclaiming of the natural world, a petulant demand for love and affection, and a mirror that reflects back one’s deepest secrets — even the ones you hide from yourself.
Bryn has crafted an enchanting sensory experience that’s steeped in this folklore, and he breathes life into it. Master sound designer Graham Reznick’s use of distorted analogue audio evokes the feeling of tapping into the realms beyond our own, and cinematographer Andreas Johannessen’s lush landscapes juxtaposed with all-knowing closeups beautifully capture both the awe and unease of the uncanny.
Every aspect of this filmmaking recalls the bewitching experience of encountering the supernatural.
When it came to crafting the narrative of “Rabbit Trap,” we felt it was important to cleave closely to the arc of the paranormal. As any experiencer will tell you, the paranormal is beguiling by nature, a plunge into the unknown that offers no easy answers. And it most certainly doesn’t unfold in three acts.
In fact, the shape of a paranormal event, like the one seen in the film, is exactly inverse to traditional story structure. It begins with something fine and pointed — a peculiar development, a confounding anomaly. It then becomes gradually more vast and mysterious as it unfolds, leading eventually to questions so expansive, they make one’s head spin.
Not only is there rarely a resolution… there’s not even an ending. The paranormal is a mystery that never stops unfolding.
John Keel was among the first to capture this anti-structure in his seminal 1975 book, “The Mothman Prophecies,” a non-fiction classic detailing a series of small-town encounters with a giant moth-like hominid, which seemed to prognosticate the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge in 1967. It’s a record of haunting mysteries, none of which are solved.
“Rabbit Trap,” haunting in its own right, elegantly captures both the allure and subtle dread one feels when finding oneself the protagonist in an uncanny journey, and as such it forges its own universe of logic, one that falls somewhere between traditional narrative and fable. It is in many ways a movie about longing. In a literal sense, it’s a longing for love and acceptance, an emotional condition familiar to anyone who’s lived a life. In a holistic sense, it’s a longing to return to the primordial state of nature from whence we all came. And in a more metaphorical sense, it represents a longing for films that dare to weave ethereal, open-ended narratives that pose indelible questions that have no answers.
In this way, “Rabbit Trap” is both a searingly compassionate illustration of marriage, and one of the most accurate portrayals of the paranormal experience that I’ve yet seen committed to film. Like the paranormal itself, this plunge into salty-sweet ambiguity is uncomfortable for some.
For folks like me, it represents a profound catharsis — one we hope that others find solace in for years to come.
“Rabbit Trap,” a Magnolia Pictures release, is now in theaters.
Daniel Noah is a co-founder of SpectreVision, the production company behind such titles as “Mandy,” “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” and “Rabbit Trap,” to name a few. With over 20 feature film credits, Daniel co-wrote and co-created the award-winning video game “Transference” for Ubisoft, and he wrote and directed “Max Rose,” the final starring vehicle of entertainment legend Jerry Lewis, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013.
An experiencer and outspoken advocate for the paranormal, he is the Director of SpectreVision Radio, a bespoke podcast network dedicated to exploration of the esoteric and uncanny. “High Strangeness,” his original comic book series based on paranormal phenomena, will be released this fall from Oni Press. A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, he is currently an Adjunct Professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, and he serves on the Advisory Board of the Philosophical Research Society and the Overlook Film Festival.
